Four of a Kind: A women's historical fiction (72 page)

I change the subject to one of her liking, a long-time tactic of mine. “I’ve decided to pursue the birth control clinic.” This is true; I want to do this more than ever. I owe this to Mama for all my lies. Besides, I have time on my hands now that Jesi is in the hospital and I don’t want to think about her coming home. With the leg bandages and tubes, she’s cumbersome to hold and always cries when I do. I know how she feels. I usually spend my time with her by holding her fingers and stroking her head. Her blonde wisps of hair, wide mouth and porcelain skin reminds me too much of how she got here. Many days I feign exhaustion and Clary goes in my stead. Marge starts going every day at noon “just in case”.

TJ comes in after basic training for a few days, on his way to France. He looks older with his hair cut so close, and he’s mean and lean-looking, too. He studies Jesi lying asleep in the hospital ward’s metal crib, then glares at me accusingly and I snap, “The doctor says it’s because we had too much sex while I was pregnant.” I leave him there with Marge and drive my Duesy home. He spends his days at the hospital or at his parents’ home and falls into my bed at night and begins snoring before I can say
don’t touch me
. “Maybe we should communicate by walky-talky,” he says one morning, before driving Duesy away. That’s the last time I see her. “We decided Jesi isn’t safe in a twenty year old Duesenberg and the war effort needs the scrap metal. Call Mother when you need a ride.”

“Anytime you need it, darling,” she says with a hug.

Two weeks later we get a telegram informing us that TJ is killed in the Normandy invasion. I feel badly for Marge.

With the deed to the plantation now in my name, I tell the estate lawyer who is reading the will that I want to sell it. “So soon?” he asks. “You should not make decisions while grieving.”

“Sell it? That’s preposterous!” shouts William, there in the lawyer’s office with Marge. TJ had willed his beloved slingshot to William and William looks none too impressed. I’m all the more determined. Marge smiles that knowing Mona-Lisa smile at it all and calmly tells William that they must go see Jesi at the hospital. He leaves in a huff.

The sale doesn’t take more than a week or so, with such prime real estate. Luckily for me, the estate lawyer says, he also represents civil rights cases and doesn’t like William. This keeps William’s lawyer and interference at bay and that’s all the details my lawyer will “bother” me with. The sale goes for much less than I had hoped for and I never meet the new owner but at the end, I don’t care. With some of the proceeds I rent a duplex on one of Savannah’s park-like squares, with enough room for Clary and Jesi, arranged by Ellen Whitman and within walking distance to her home. She wants me near for her own reasons, I want out of small-minded Pickerville (“Pickleville” I nicknamed it, just to irritate TJ), and with no constant reminders of Uncle Joe, I love my new home. Clary fusses about the move but has become so attached to Jesi that I convince her to move with me, knowing she’ll tend to Jesi now that she’s home. She’s almost three months old and admittedly I’m scared to tend to her on my own.

On the other side of the duplex, Ellen and I convert into office space and name it the Bess Birth Control Clinic, using only its acronym of BBCC on the front door. This is partly funded by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and partly funded by private donations from those women who come in for contraceptive information. Laws like the Comstock Law forbidding dissemination of contraceptive information had finally been overturned, but the religious wings are a pain in the ass. I sit as receptionist and pass out pamphlets sent by my grateful Mama, and I hire a nurse who comes in a few hours a day to privately discuss birth control methods in the back room. Ellen is a tireless volunteer; she gets the word out, prints more pamphlets and brings in more funding and soon the waiting room fills daily.

I feel more useful here than at home. Jesi prefers Clary and we all only get frustrated with each other. I lose patience with Jesi’s slow growth and healing. Another leg surgery and brace sets her back and
she’s not able to crawl and falls over easily when sitting. And that wide, bright smile of hers! I can’t bear it.

“I’m keen on what I’m doing,” I tell Mama. “The women look so relieved when they walk out of the clinic, knowing they have some control back in their lives. Most have four or more children and can’t afford to feed another, the husband left or is killed in the war, or it endangers the mother’s health, or a myriad of sad reasons. Some come in disguises, with wigs and scarves, and about everyone comes in with sunglasses on. I joke that I’m going to go on the radio announcing, ‘Every day is a sunny day at BBCC’! Nurse Jones takes them into a private room and shows them how to use condoms or douches and for the brave and few, the diaphragm, and we discuss other methods like counting days until ovulation. We’re secretly handing out free condoms and lubricants to those who ask for our
feminine hygiene products
– the term we’ve given to keep them disguised - but that’s becoming risky. I’m afraid word is getting out and I’m receiving threatening telephone calls from religious groups telling me I’m killing God’s children and this wicked sin must be stopped.” I love sounding grown-up to her and talking her language.

“I attended the Chicago Birth Control Conference in 1923,” says Mama, “and I remember one of our own, Eleanor Wembridge, saying there that it would be difficult if not impossible to teach the dull how to use birth control. In my experience, it’s impossible to teach the deacons, not the dull. I’d hoped that when Preacher Paul passed away, the younger preacher would have fresh ideas, but that’s not to be so. God never changes, he says. Church-going women remain afraid to prevent pregnancies. I’ll send you her paper titled
The Seventh Child in the Four-room House.
”

I want to say that I don’t want more papers, I’m inundated with them; I want Mama here. I want to say that one of the threatening callers sounds like TJ’s father. But Mama is swamped with work at her clinic and the Lighthouse in Annan New York and promises yet again to try to free herself up to come down and help out. She recommends I screen my calls, so I begin giving out the code name of “Jesi” to only those women who come in.

The next morning a note is tacked on the BBCC front door, scribbled with
Neither repented they of their murders, nor of their sorceries, nor of their magic potions, nor of their fornication, nor of their thefts. Revelations 9:21
.

With a shaky hand I extend this note to Clary who promptly turns to her family Bible, its brown leather looking as spotted and worn as her hands. “I didn’t think that sounded right,” she says. “Now why in the world would someone add ‘magic potion’? Ain’t God’s Word good enough?” she mutters, studying the note suspiciously.

I suddenly feel a wave of sickness not unlike those three days in hell up in Mrs. Worthington’s attic. That’s when I have my own revelation.

I stick this note under Mrs. Worthington’s nose. “I don’t get it,” I say. “You support abortion but oppose birth control?”

She sits at her kitchen table and wipes her spectacle lens and reads it down her nose, through her glasses. “You should know better than to think that I judge what women do with their bodies. You can sleep with the devil for all I care.” I see she’s still angry with me for walking out on her kitchen work. “You remember Mr. Dotson, don’t you? The one you call an old coot?” She doesn’t look at me for an answer and I stand and wait. “Well, he’s also an old snoop and I catch him sneaking around here all the time. He heard us talking about the potion I sold you, and he heard –well we all heard – you vomiting all hours of the night. He told me so himself. That’s how he justified peeping into your keyhole. ‘Course that wasn’t the only time I caught him doing that. He likes to call you a sweet tart. There’s not much I can do about him. Don’t underestimate his age or the men he runs with.”

This same night after I return home from the boarding house, I’m awakened by the smell of smoke. In our robes, Clary and I find ourselves outside on the street, dazed, shivering and taking turns holding Jesi while watching the firemen put out the flames to BBCC. The three-feet high flaming white cross in the front yard they leave be, like it’s a lawn ornament. Clary seems hypnotized by the cross, mumbling prayers. Usually Jesi is comforted immediately by her but
not tonight. Jesi senses Clary’s condition and screams in absolute terror.

A fireman approaches. “We think we’ve found the culprit,” he says, holding out a blackened tool. “Do you know where this might’ve come from?”

“What is it?” I ask.

“Sorry, ma’am, of course you wouldn’t know. It’s a welder’s torch.”

We end the night with Jesi and me in Ellen’s nursery on a small cot and Clary on a blanket pallet in Ellen’s parlor – until Jesi fusses so much that I have to take her to Clary that is. “Go ahead and sleep on the floor. See if I care,” I say, handing her over at three in the morning. I want her to snuggle with me, like I see other toddlers with their mothers, but she’s so thorny.

“You’re coming home,” Mama announces, when I telephone her the next morning in a shaky voice and not caring if I sound grownup. “I’ll send someone down there to get you. He can get to you sooner than I can.”

That afternoon a black Ford truck pulls up out front of Ellen’s house, with a Tennessee license plate. “I’m Jerry,” he says, taking his felt hat off at the door and bowing just enough for good old-fashioned manners. He has a full head of white hair, pulled back in a ponytail and I’ve never seen anything like him. He’s beautiful and old at the same time. I immediately want to sit at his feet and ask him about the migration of birds or something like that. At first he looks like the silent Indian Chief type and I feel like everything is going to be okay and I wonder at the same time, how does he do that? His presence fills Ellen’s parlor. But then after his cup of coffee, he spoils it by clapping his hands together and saying in a strong hillbilly accent, “Let’s fire ‘er up!” We all look at him in shock and watch his expression change from cheerful to sorrow as he realizes the
implication. “My tongue twisted around my eye teeth and I couldn’t see what I was saying.” He bowed again. “Please forgive me, ma’am.”

I shrug at the old hillbilly and mumble,
Thanks, Mama
.

I don’t have much beyond some smoky-smelling clothing and I pack little, two suitcases. I had sold the furniture with the plantation house; all that old wood seemed to have grown roots there. The duplex apartment was furnished and now smoke-damaged, the office next door is destroyed. Not even Clary will come with us. “There’s other white folks I can care for, and I’m gonna stay with my sister until I finds me one” she answers coolly, like this is all my fault for “running away”. I see where Jesi gets her pigheadedness.

Marge comes around looking so distraught and disheveled, she loses goddess-status. I’m thinking she must suspect the same group I do. It doesn’t help her age either that she’s still mourning TJ, covered head-to-foot in black, so that I take pity on her and promise that Jesi and I won’t be gone long; “just a visit with the other side”. She and Clary cry anyway and Jesi intuitively understands and I have to wrench her from Clary’s arms. I promise to write. I promise to come back. I think back to all those false promises.

We’re heading north and out of Georgia before I can get Jesi to calm down. She basically just passes out. I miss Clary already.

In the silence that finally settles on us, I mumble, “So how do you know my mama?”

“It’s a long story,” he says.

I’m too frazzled to hear a long story from a man, especially one with a hillbilly accent. I want his silent muscular profile wisely making me a path toward home. If he talks, he might slow down. No doubt Mama knows him from one of her chapters or leagues or clinics. Who cares? He gives me an odd look and I’m not sure if I said ‘who cares’ out loud or not. “Nice weather we’re having,” I say with a yawn and we’re distracted by the rain and hail. I hold hands with the passenger door and go back to sleep. Jesi lays stretched out on my lap or between us on the seat, like more luggage. She and I sleep a great deal of the trip, both exhausted from the trauma and sudden changes.

We’re in Pennsylvania when he stops for his hundredth cup of coffee and asks, “What happened to her leg?”

I rub my eyes irritably. I’d scarcely woken from a short nightmare of searching for something unknown and running through fire trying to find it. I hesitate and keep to myself,
Could be the cousin who raped me
, and then continue out loud, “Could be from lying on my stomach in my job at the shipyard, could be the fibers from the welding torch, could be the magic potion, could be the wrath of God for my wicked sins. I’ve thought about it over and over, to the point that I don’t want to think about it any longer. Mama will know what to do.” I wonder to myself,
Why am I protecting TJ?

He merely nods as if he’s heard it all. “Your mommy and mam-maw will take good care of both of you.” Only a fleeting thought, I wonder how he knows that.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, like I had cared enough to ask him a question. “Now that your mammaw and mommy have done their work and women have got their basic rights, I’m giving civil rights their due attention. We sure got a lot of poor colored people in Tennessee who get a raw deal and every time one so much as complains or steps out of line, in come the KKK and shut him up for good …” and on he rambles, not seeming to notice that I’d become deaf-mute and attached to the passenger door. I doze off and on.